EMC Session at Cloud Expo

VMware has bought UK-based Rabbit Technologies Ltd, the three-year-old open source company behind the RabbitMQ messaging system, for its SpringSource unit, another recent acquisition. Terms were not disclosed.

SpringSource, which says RabbitMQ has something of a corner on the cloud market and wanted the little company's talent for support, means to add the messaging system to its own Java application infrastructure and management suite as well as offer it as a service. It will stay open source.

Clouds like NASA's Nebula reportedly use the widgetry because it's scalable and stable, employs open protocols and needs no client-side agents. And clouds of course need a messaging system for application-to-application communication, routing user requests to the right resources regardless of where they are, shuffling data around and reporting, even e-mail.

SpringSource general manager Rod Johnson calls it "an essential."

"While messaging has always been a key infrastructure element used in the creation of enterprise applications," he says, "cloud applications require a fundamentally different messaging infrastructure. By adding RabbitMQ to our suite, SpringSource can extend its emerging application platform with another element of technology that is critical to modern virtual and cloud deployment models."

Integration with the Spring Framework is supposed to let the community of Spring developers leverage RabbitMQ as they evolve their applications from traditional data centers into private and public cloud deployments. SpringSource means to support the RabbitMQ developer community as well.

Rabbit Technologies, co-founded by CEO Alexis Richardson, spun out of LShift Ltd, a UK software consultancy, and CohesiveFT, the US virtualization and cloud computing concern.